The present invention relates broadly to computer software for graphical representation of physical objects, and, more particularly, to a method and system for enhancing digital graphical images to achieve a high level of realism, especially for complex objects and 3-D computer graphics.
As computers have become more powerful, the ability to create realistic computer graphics has been enhanced. Conventional computer graphics techniques revolve around rendering even greater volumes of polygonal geometry in order to achieve higher image fidelity. The general approach has been aided by an ever-increasing availability of compute cycles. While increasing compute cycles increases traditional rendering throughput, there remain barriers to increased realism using this approach. No matter how much computer capacity is available at a given time, there exists a threshold beyond which the number of polygons in a computer graphics scene cannot be efficiently rendered and increasing the compute, or rendering cycles does little to aid in the actual creation of photorealistic content.